


The Prelude

by TheFlashFic



Series: Playing Triplets [2]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: AU, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 20:51:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3951307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Mason's party everyone goes home, and repercussions are felt at once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prelude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shaloved30](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaloved30/gifts).



> Okay, sequel. This is still Westallen with the Barriscowest being in pre-status. But I think we all know where it's going to go next. Happy birthday, Sha! <3

There’s a melody in his head, underneath the hum of the lights on the bus and the scrape of the tires on the street and the quiet chatter of the only other late night riders **.**

It surprises Cisco: normally after a full day of playing he likes radio silence in his brain. No headphones, no music, just a little cloud of quiet so the songs don’t run together and clash and wear him out. And it’s been a long day for him - his day job, a couple of hours practice at home, and then playing the party.

But this time, after this day of playing, there’s a snatch of a song and he can’t shake it.

He doesn’t try to shake it. He listens to it. He shuts his eyes and holds his guitar case tightly and lets the imagined tune repeat in his head. A series, arrhythmic with triplets. An easy sound, like the chatter of guests at a party. But special: the chatter of a couple of distinct people at that party.

He smiles to himself absently, fingers twitching to form chords.

They’d been a nice couple of people.

He should be thinking about logistics, about the shocking wad of money in his pocket, twice the fee Mason Bridge offered on the phone. He should be excited, thinking about the people who heard him and all the hands he had to shake before he could get away once he was done, all the people who stuck his number into their phones for their husband’s birthday daughter’s wedding friend who owns a coffee shop who likes live music.

This might be a big deal for him. His big break. Not fame or fortune, but maybe a chance to stop putting out his guitar case on a sidewalk and playing for hours hoping for tips.

But he doesn’t think about any of that. It’ll be there in the morning, he figures. He can worry or get excited or feel overwhelmed then. Plenty of time.

As he sits back and feels the bus shudder along the road, he’s content to close his eyes and slide his fingers absently up the frets of an air guitar, and listen to this new tune form itself in his mind.

* * *

 

“So? Are you glad I made you come?”

Barry blinks his brain into focus and looks over, taking in Iris’s profile as she drives. She’s got her hands at ten and two, her eyes unwavering on the road, and he loves that she drives like a grandmother. He loves that she goes exactly five miles over the speed limit and no more.

He loves her, and it’s always on the top of his thoughts, all the time, for years. He’s never settled into it, never once glanced her way and then away again without being utterly struck by it.

He clears his throat, because before she spoke he’d been lost thinking about...music.

Long hair and dark beard and hands on a guitar.

And he isn’t sure how to feel about those thoughts.

“Definitely,” he said finally, because it was an easy question to answer. He was always glad to go out with her.

She smiles and glances over, a quick dart of eyes before they go back to the road.

His eyes stay on her profile. “We should’ve said goodbye to…”

“Cisco.” She says the name quickly. It floats down between them and sits there, a presence.

He examines the feeling, the strangeness of some random guy’s name being...more than a name. After a moment, though, he smiles. “Yeah. Cisco. I think I could’ve managed it without stammering, even.”

Her lips curve upward. Fond smile, his smile, and he warms from just seeing the edges of it. “You keep thinking that, Bar.”

Christ, he loves her so much. The way she smiles when she says his name, the tease in her voice, the drape of her fingers over the steering wheel. Her entirely unconscious (and entirely unfair) habit of biting at her bottom lip as she drives.

The way her eyes looked back at the party, under the strung-up lights out on that open-air patio, listening to the sounds of a guitar. The way she watched Cisco play, so enthralled, wonder in her eyes that matched how Barry had felt as he first realized the music he was so distracted by wasn’t a recording.

She rambled a little when Cisco introduced himself. Not much, Barry still owns the ramble crown in their home by a good bit, but it was so uncharacteristic for her that he can’t help but focus in on it. Iris, she doesn’t get flustered by people. She has confidence, from her hair down to the graceful arches of her feet.

But tonight she rambled. She flushed - Barry was holding her close enough that he could feel the warmth of it - and she rambled and she stared at Cisco as he played like she could feed herself from the sight.

It’s interesting. It’s new, and they’ve been together for so long that new things don’t come along all that often with them.

But the strangest thing, Barry reflects as he watches Iris drive, is that for every minute Barry was watching her as she watched Cisco...there was another minute when he was also watching Cisco play. Barry can recall the way Iris’s skin flowed under those strands of lights, and just as clearly he can recall how quickly and artfully Cisco’s fingers moved over his strings. The way his hair fell in his face as he played. The way his eyes came up more and more often and found them, both of them, as if their listening was important to him.

The way Barry thinks about him now, even. The strange, poetic kind of way his brain assigns these memories. He’s not a poetic guy; he’s a gawky, inarticulate science nerd. Except when it comes to Iris. And now some complete stranger at a pretentious journalist party.

Or maybe the guy, the music, the strings of lights, are all just making him more poetic in general. How would a guy like Cisco, who writes songs so must be poetic and articulate, how would he describe Iris in his thoughts? How did his eyes see her? Are those strands of twinkling lights stars to a guy like Cisco? Is Iris Cleopatra, Yemaja, a modernized goddess the way she is when Barry looks at her?

A happy, intelligent, adorable goddess who paints her toenails on the couch and scarfs down cronuts three at a time when Barry buys them and pretends to resent him for it before making him help her work them off? Who writes like a woman on a mission, even when she was stuck doing fluff pieces before Mason started to mentor her?

How much of that shows on her face when a stranger at a party sees her? To Barry it’s all painted on her skin, every side of her, her grouchy sleepy faces in the mornings when his alarm wakes her up, and her love of episodic TV dramas and the way she lets Barry rip into their plots without shushing him, as if she’s just as fascinated by his talking about actual timelines for DNA testing and the absurdity of the NCIS hacking expert also being their DNA analyst and phone tracer as if ‘science’ is just one big fluid cloud where being good at one part means you’re good at every single piece…

Does Cisco see on Barry’s face that he rambles, even in his thoughts, even when he’s not nervous?

He can’t stop wondering. What do they look like, he and Iris? Why did those dark eyes come back to them over and over again? Why did Cisco come over and speak to them and ignore everyone else listening to him?

There’s a part of Barry that thinks they must look absurd together, he all goofy and gangly and awkward, and Iris - Iris - beside him. But there’s also a part of him, a part that grows louder every passing month he spends with Iris, that feels proud. At home, like he’s right where he should be, and like Iris makes no sense anywhere but by his side.

There’s a bigger part of him, at least right now, in the car, watching Iris driving and shifting a little the longer he stares at her, that wants to touch her so badly he’s willing to risk a wreck.

She’s his. Her fascination in Cisco, and Cisco’s fascination in both of them, has somehow made that clearer. A more concrete fact. A hypothesis that’s just been firmed up into a theory.

He slips his hand to her leg, fingertips sliding up her thigh lightly. He can do this, touch her, whenever he wants to. It still feels like a trick he’s playing on the world.

She looks over, smiles, slides her hand on top of his against her thigh. “I guess you’re not thinking about Cisco anymore, mm?”

“Actually...I kind of am?” He wants to meet her eyes but they go back to the road. Instead he traces patterns against her bare skin until he reaches the hem of that short skirt that drew so many eyes to her tonight.

So many eyes, but only one pair that stays with him.

Her teeth scrape against her bottom lip again, and she squeezes his hand. “We’re almost home,” she says, and there’s some extra breath in her words.

A trick. Some kind of deception he’s playing against the universe, being allowed to make her breath catch and her body shiver. Must be. And he’s going to keep on deceiving the universe until the day he dies.

“He couldn’t stop looking at you once he saw you,” Barry says, sliding his fingertips back and forth against the hemline of the skirt and where it hits high up on her thigh.

She laughs, mostly air, and her throat works. “He stopped lots of times, and it wasn’t--”

“But he looked back every time. Like he couldn’t control himself.”

She keeps her eyes on the road but her hand slips up his arm, light against his jacket sleeve. “And,” she continues insistently. “It wasn’t me, Barry. It was us. You couldn’t tell?”

Barry could tell, he just can’t admit it so easily. Cisco met his eyes almost every time he looked up from his guitar, and not in some guilty I’m-checking-out-your-girl kind of way. Barry was simply included, part of his gaze.

And it makes no logical sense at all for the idea of that to make him feel warm all over. For all that he’s tall and gangly and awkward Barry is aware that he’s decent looking. And when he sees picture of himself and Iris, he likes to think he looks even better than decent. She elevates him. So it’s not like he isn’t used to occasional appreciative looks.

It’s that this time around he really welcomes the idea. Maybe because it was them Cisco seemed to see, not Iris or Barry, but the pair. Barry’s always liked being paired with Iris, always got a simple thrill out of one of their friends rolling their eyes and joking about the creature known as Irisandbarry.

His fingers slip down to her inner thigh. He traces impossibly soft skin with the pads of his fingertips and goes no further. Almost home. He wants her, though. He adores her, adores them, and he feels it so hard in the memory of a pair of black-brown eyes seeking them out.

Her fingers lay over his, not slowing his movements, just...being part of them. She breathes out, and it’s unsteady. “Home soon,” she says again, sounding like she’s reminding herself more than him.

He grins.

 

* * *

 

Cisco has to walk a half mile from the bus stop to his place. It’s a walk he knows well, but he doesn’t let his mind wander too far when he has one of his instruments with him. It’s a pretty low income area - good people, but broke, and hurting, and sometimes the temptation for a quick thirty bucks at the pawn shop is too much to resist.

It’s happened to him before. And he doesn’t mind it much, but he really can’t afford to lose another guitar. And he doesn’t want to risk anyone finding the cash in his pocket. As much as he digs the gritty Tom-Waitsian aspects to being a wandering troubadour surrounded by addicts and drunks and people who never had a real chance in life...he doesn’t particularly want to fund it.

He doesn’t even know what he wants to do with the money. Saving’s not his style, and he just got himself a beat-up old Fender that cost him weeks of savings but plays like a dream, so he’s covered as far as instruments go.

He can reimburse himself and his rent stash for the polo shirt he’s wearing that he had to bus over to Walmart to get because his wardrobe is work uniforms and t-shirts and literally nothing else. His brother Dante said the work shirts would totally work for a hipster busk kind of vibe, but he figured Mason Bridge’s party didn’t call for hipster. He went with invisible instead.

And it worked. At least Bridge seemed happy enough to thrust a wad of cash at him while he was packing up the guitar.

They were gone by then. That couple. Iris and Barry. They had been pulled off their couch by Bridge late in the night, and never made it back over. Cisco looked for them.

He walks up the steps to the front door of the building, which swings open when he pushes it. It’s supposed to lock, he’s got a key and everything, but it’s been busted since he first moved in.

Dante’s idea of being a loser failed musician is working his flop sales job and living at home. Cisco’s? Streetcorners and this shitty, shitty little room he lives in. They get along well all the same. Dante packs his keyboards and comes over now and then to jam, and Cisco goes home for dinner when his budget’s stretched too tight for anything but Ramen.

He unlocks his door - that’s one lock he makes sure stays working - and strolls into his room. He leans the guitar case against the wall, peels off that polo shirt and tosses it into a corner, and he sighs to himself contentedly.

He pulls his hair back with a band that stays stretched around his wrist, and he drops down on his futon. The Fender, the beautiful Fender he hasn’t dared take outside of his apartment yet even to play a rich dude’s party, is there on the edge of the bed where he left it.

He picks it up, he strokes up the dark wood of the neck lovingly, and he pulls it close to his chest. And with a smile, and a thought towards Iris’s kind full-lipped smile and Barry’s vivid wide green-eyed stare, he starts to pluck out the tune that the bus ride home put into his head.

 

* * *

 

Iris laughs as Barry drops the keys twice. She stays plastered to his side, which isn’t helping but she’s enjoying it all the same, and leans in to press a kiss to his neck as reward when he finally gets the security door open.

Barry makes a soft sound and his arm locks around her waist. He pulls her with him but she stumbles to keep up with his long-legged, hurried stride. He just pulls harder, like he wants to pick her up and carry her if it gets them there faster.

There’s too much blood in her body, too much heat pulsing through her with every heartbeat. She’s too aware of everything, and though it’s funny to see Barry’s hurry, it also makes her breath catch and her body tingle.

They get to the elevator doors and Barry jabs the button impatiently.

His dad helps them pay for this place, this gorgeous downtown highrise with its dozen security features. Her salary and his together are enough to make the rent - it’s nothing like Mason’s swank penthouse, it’s doable - but Barry’s dad puts money in his account every month all the same.

“No future daughter-in-law of mine is going to live like less than a queen,” he said cheerfully to Iris when they were talking about moving in together. Henry’s a doctor, and Nora’s started raking it in thanks to her investment llc taking off, so Iris doesn’t feel too bad agreeing to it. She knows her dad would help them out too if he could. It just gives him one more thing to argue with Henry about when the two families get together.

But she doesn’t want to think about their parents right now. Those elevator doors open and she moves inside before Barry and hits the back wall, turning and leaning back against is, smiling at him in invitation.

He barely remembers to push the button for their floor before he’s there against her, pressing her into the wall, stooping down and pushing their mouths together eagerly.

She feels his urgency. It’s shared. It’s been simmering inside of her most of the evening, worse and worse the longer that party went on. None of that is surprising, though - it’s hard for her to be dispassionate about Barry as it is, and after a long evening sharing him with other people it’s so much more intense.

She loves to see him through other people’s eyes. She’s known him for so long, introducing him to strangers is her favorite way of seeing him, for a moment, like he’s brand new.

Iris laces her arms around his neck and hikes up on her toes and she loves that he’s so much taller than her but it’s hard to press into him completely when he has to stoop to kiss her. Minor complaint, though, especially when she knows they’ll be in bed in seconds once the elevator doors open.

His hands slide up her sides and around to her back. He kisses her hungrily, full on, his breath ragged against her cheek. He’s hard, she can feel him against her hip, and she can’t help but arch against him and listen to how his breathing stutters in response.

The elevator stops, the door slides open, and it starts to slide closed before they separate and Barry stretches out a long arm to hit the button to make them open again. He looks back at her with a crooked grin, but it’s less sheepish about almost missing their floor and more ‘okay, we have to be in public again for ten more seconds, we can do it’.

But there’s only three other apartments on their floor, and there’s no one in the hall, and she can’t keep her hands off of him. She sticks close behind him as he strides for the door, her hands on his waist, and when he stops to fumble again with the keys she presses against his back, slides her hands around to move up his chest. He’s skinny, her Barry, but he’s solid, and she absolutely loves the feel of him.

He makes a whining sound and almost drops the keys again. “Iris…” his voice is strained.

She presses her smile against his spine. “Hurry.”

Another whine, but the keys find the lock and the door flies open and he turns, grabbing her hips and hauling her backwards with him. He kicks the door shut and they’re alone, finally.

She imagines a hurried run to the bedroom, a trail of clumsily discarded clothes behind them. But Barry just presses her back against the door and reaches for the hem of her dress.

 

* * *

 

It’s a playful melody. Surprisingly complicated even from the first - usually he starts simple and builds up the fancy beats, but this. This has triplets in every measure, occasionally repeating but mostly just traveling along. He’s not big on structure when he writes. Telling a story, Cisco believes, shouldn’t involve forced repetition. Some stories don’t keep falling back to the same place. Some stories just keep moving forward.

“That’s why you’ll never get anywhere,” Dante told him one night, annoyed at Cisco’s habit of playing fifteen minutes at a time without coming close to settling on a melody. “What sells these days is four minute songs, verse chorus verse bridge chorus. You’re not gonna get famous playing like you already are famous and can get away with this self-indulgent thing.”

Cisco will never get famous because he’s a dirt-poor brown dude with no formal training and no connections. But he doesn’t argue. Dante gave up his own dreams entirely. Dante doesn’t play at all outside their little practice sessions, so Dante likes to remind them both why Cisco’s still a failure even if he still plays.

It’s not fair, and it doesn’t make their relationship any less strained, but Cisco gets it. He doesn’t invite Dante over often, so he doesn’t mind playing the whipping boy every now and then.

Besides, he knows what sells. He’s not clueless. Unlike Dante he’s out there almost every day finding out what people want to hear by playing for them. He has kicky four minute versions of the stuff he writes, but mostly he sticks to covers. People want to hear what they already know, at least when they’re on their way to lunch and walking past a stranger sitting in front of the library strumming a guitar.

Barry and Iris, for instance. They listened to everything he played for them with the same level of interest, but the one song that got them involved was that cover that they sang along to each other to. Probably well, he imagines. Their voices probably blend together perfectly.

Just like that he’s not thinking about Dante anymore, or the state of the music business as it pertains to dirty buskers, or whatever it was Bridge called him earlier.

He’s just thinking about green eyes and glowing smiles, and the way they curled up together like they were more comfortable with each other’s bodies than most people ever got to be with their own.

He plays, and the rhythm only gets more complex.

 

* * *

 

Barry doesn’t think of himself as a particularly brave person, mostly because in his life he’s never had to be very brave. He’s had a happy, easy life. Only one thing in his life he has ever been utterly determined to fight for no matter what happens, but he has yet to need to.

Iris has always been his. The way he’s always, always belonged entirely to her.

Still, his moments of bravery are few and far between. This he considers to be one of them, when he presses his beautiful goddess of a fiance back against their front door and pulls her dress up past her hips.

She’s surprised, he can feel it in the way her breath catches and her body stays still for just a moment. But she sighs out a ragged breath and lifts her arms over her head and he pulls the dress off and lets it fall.

Barry kisses her, rough and graceless and needy. His fingertips slide down her skin, catching against the band of her bra and sliding around to her back to unfasten it and get it out of the way. He leans down, trailing his mouth down her throat and feeling as her breath catches and releases. Her fingers slide through his hair.

He tugs her bra down her arms and lets it join the dress in a forgotten heap on the floor. Feeling her shiver against him expectantly, he slides down to his knees in front of her.

“Barry.” She breathes out his name, wide-eyed when he looks up at her. He presses his answering smile against her stomach, mouthing her skin as his hands slide down the full curve of her hips to her thighs.

He knows what he wants, what they both want, but up against the door is probably not the best place for it. He leans back, taking her in. She’s left in just her heels and a tease of a thong, and she’s incredible. There isn’t one inch of her that he hasn’t tasted, but not one inch of her that he can look at without feeling hungry all over again.

Her eyes are only half-focused when she looks down at him. Her fingers slip from his hair, and she bites at her lip in that incredibly distracting way. “Bed?”

He shakes his head. “Too far.”

Her throat works.

 

* * *

 

There’s two themes that seem to be recurring in this song as he plays it through, discovering more and more sides of it.

There’s a confident melody that pushes to make itself heard, a showy, pretty thing that lilts up above everything else, that dares you not to hear it. But underneath it there’s a quieter pattern, hidden under the first, supporting it, but when Cisco focuses on that pattern it’s just as remarkable for all its bashfulness.

Green eyes and brown. Full gorgeous smile and quicker, crooked grin.

He won’t see them again. That’s obvious. They live in a world of penthouse parties, and Cisco clearly doesn’t. But they’re right there, in the tune, and he doesn’t plan to let them escape from that.

Sometimes people just stick. It’s not something he’s had happen to him often, only once before actually, but he doesn’t mind it now. It feels like a piece of inspiration he’s been missing, a minor shake-up to his routine. A new song. And if that’s all it is, that’s enough for him.

A new song is always welcome.

 

* * *

 

They discovered sex together. In high school, younger than their parents probably realize but not too young. They were together, and their friends were having sex and talking about it all the time, and it just got too tempting to ignore.

They had no idea what they were doing, but they taught each other what felt good.

Barry has never had his face between anyone else’s legs. Everything he knows came from research - she knows he researched it, he researches everything - and from Iris herself offering suggestion and telling him what made her feel good.

He’s so, so good now. It’s all Iris can do to hold her legs apart and try not to yank at his hair as his mouth works her so thoroughly. He knows how to read her, when she wants a tease and when she wants to come. He knows without her having to say a word when to slide fingers inside of her, when to seal his lips against her and lash his tongue against her clit until she’s lost the ability to even gasp his name.

She can only arch and writhe and press him close against her, listening to the hungry sounds he makes. His mouth is magical, and tonight she’s so aware of him that it feels like she’s outside of her own body, watching them together. Watching herself shuddering and gasping out helpless, wordless sounds as his mouth and tongue and fingers work her over. She sees herself stretched out on the couch, flexing, arching, almost like she’s putting on a show for herself, making her pleasure visible.

No...maybe she’s not putting on the show for herself. Maybe she’s moaning extra loudly and arching her back into bows that make her breasts heave and bounce for the benefit of someone else.

Not Barry. He’s completely focused on what he’s doing. He barely even hears her when he’s really going to work, or so he says. Which is good, because sometimes she babbles.

No, she’s putting on a display, turning their sex into art, for someone else. Some audience who isn’t even there.

Deep brown eyes, calloused fingers on a guitar. You want to write a love song? Iris thinks to herself in scattered, incoherent snatches of words. Write this.

 

* * *

 

There’s a third motif that keeps appearing in his tune. He’s been playing for a while, long enough that Dante would be pissed if he was there, and certain themes have solidified. That confident, showy Iris melody, that quieter, steady and gorgeous Barry pattern underneath. And a third, quick fingers sliding up and down the frets. A Latin sound, something Cisco tends to avoid because the last thing he needs on streetcorners are wise-ass white guys shouting out requests for La Bamba or asking when the pan flute dude’s gonna get there and join in.

But it’s here now, and he plays it comfortably, and it fits the other two well. It’s...perfect. It’s complete. He’s never had this fully-formed a song come to him so fast.

And damn, he forgot to grab his cheap little hand-held recorder to capture what he’s doing so he can start getting it down on paper later. He needs to record this, this complex sound, the three motifs sliding into one, the triplets bouncing off each other and gliding together.

Never seeing a couple like Iris and Barry again, it’s a distant sad reality for a guy like Cisco. But losing the song they inspired? That would be a tragedy.

He can’t stop, though. He tells himself to pause, to look around for the recorder and turn it on and dive back in, thirty seconds tops, but he can’t do it. His fingers won’t stop moving.

Inspiration can be a little self-defeating that way.

 

* * *

 

As Barry pushes inside of Iris he still has the taste of her in his mouth, and for a moment it’s too much to handle. He stalls, freezes his hips, licks his lips, and tries to stop shuddering.

Her fingers slide up his shoulders, down his arms. “Barry,” she whispers.

He squeezes his eyes shut.

She’s already come once with his tongue against her, and she’s wet and hot and eager from it, pushing up against him, trying to take him in deeper. He breathes out, almost a sob, and drops his head down against her shoulder. “Iris.”

Her fingers slide through his hair, and his lips brush against the heated skin of her shoulder, and he takes the moment to get himself together.

No one has ever seen her like this but him. No one has ever tasted the sweat off her skin and captured her orgasms with their tongues, and seen her with this heated glaze in her eyes. That’s not usually particularly important to him, the fact of their being the only one for each other. Iris would hit him, hard, if she ever thought he was archaic enough to value her more for her only having been with him. And he’s not. He would worship at her feet either way.

But he thinks to himself sometimes, when their friends are giving them crap about still acting like newlyweds years after they started dating, he thinks ‘if you could see her, you would understand’. It’s almost a shame that she doesn’t have any exes out there, because then someone else in the world would know what Barry does.

He wants someone to see.

It’s a strange realization to have while he’s struggling not to come just from the grip of her body taking him in. But maybe not so strange after the night they’ve had. Barry wants someone who will appreciate it to see her this way, so he can share it with someone. He wants someone to see them together, to see that Barry, awkward as he can sometimes be, fits with her. That she’s a goddess but he makes her feel so good that maybe he’s someone pretty special himself.

He wants warm brown eyes to witness this. He wants to know what an artistic and poetic mind would come up with about it. About them.

We should have said goodbye to him, he thinks again to himself as he opens his eyes and braces, slips his mouth against the line of her neck as he rolls his hips to bury himself inside of her.

She gasps, strained. Her fingers grip his hair, tight. His name drops from her lips again, a breath of sound and not much more. But everything. Christ. He can’t even breathe sometimes for how much he loves her.

They move together, and maybe Barry’s not a poetic guy but this is art all the same.

 

* * *

 

The tune takes a sensual turn, and Cisco is distantly surprised by it. His songs tend to be innocent, or if not innocent at least unromantic.

It’s probably just in his head, though. Nobody listening to him play would pick out what he does about how these different motifs in the song glide together and come apart, touch each other and separate. Blend together entirely until they’re one long complex sound, before splitting from each other again. They take on echoes of each other, like they can’t blend together without rubbing off a little bit.

He’s been playing most of his life, too long to glamorize what he does even in his own mind. Being a musician means sitting on sidewalks, getting kicked by teenagers, moved along by cops, yelled at by business owners. Humored by passers-by, some enough to actually put money in his case.

There’s nothing romantic about what he does. He’s got weird callouses on his fingers and no ambition for real life success. That’s not romantic, it’s pathetic. If he ever doubts that his family’s usually quick to remind him.

But man, he’s thinking some serious stuff right now.

It feels like art, what he’s doing on his sad little futon in his sad little apartment. It feels like some higher inspiration, something he’s not used to. He writes a lot, and his stuff is pretty good, but this is new.

It doesn’t help that he associates these melodies to specific people. Two very attractive, very obviously in love people, who must move together the way the melodies are. It really doesn’t help that he’s got a shade of himself in there, that quick-fingered almost-Latin sound that flits around the other two and away again.

It’s a story he’s writing, but unlike most of his songs this is a true story about real people, with just a little fiction in it at the third melody’s presence.

He doesn’t like thinking too hard about his own life and all the things that will never happen for him, so he shuts his eyes and clears his head and shifts the guitar on his lap, and he plays.

 

* * *

 

She can feel it coming, and it makes her legs squeeze tight around Barry’s hips. He’s moving raggedly, all trace of rhythm lost, and she rocks with his thrusts and looks up at him with glazed vision. Her arms are over her head, gripping the couch cushion with white knuckles as she watches him move.

He’s beautiful. Lean but strong, pale and dotted with freckles, moles, each one she knows the taste of. There’s a flush burning down his chest and up his cheeks, and his hair’s gone limp and mussed. He’s stronger than he looks, his hands on her hips pulling her to meet him with every push inside.

She is strong and confident and sure, but she’s helpless with him, like this. She wants nothing more than to feel the thick slide of him inside of her, feel his hands gripping her, pressing dents into her flesh.

He isn’t confident and sure, but he is with her, like this. He moves with certainty, knowing that she’s getting her pleasure and so focusing on his own. His mind shuts off, that always-running brain lost in static, and she knows he’s seeing nothing but her, feeling nothing but her.

Look at him, she can’t help but think, and the thought isn’t meant for her. It’s meant for someone else. That invisible pair of eyes, the gaze she can’t stop feeling. Look at him.

The twitch inside of her takes her by surprise. It’s been coming for a while but it hits all of the sudden, making her back arch and her nails dig into the cushion. She slurs out a sound, yes and his name and oh god all sliding together into a stutter of a cry, and the heat spreads inside of her until she’s a thousand degrees and limp-limbed because of it.

Barry wasn’t holding back much, but now that she’s come again he really lets go. He doesn’t take too long to follow behind her, a few piston-fast thrusts of his hips and a hoarse sound and a sobbed breath, and he pulls her in and holds her tight against him and works himself through it.

Iris just opens her arms to him as he sags against her, and she strokes his sweaty back as they both fight to catch their breath. And she thinks, look at him. A command, adoring and proud. Look at him.

 

* * *

 

Playing the way he does, sometimes it’s too stream-of-consciousness to reach a real ending. Sometimes he just slows to a stop and lets his fingers fall from the strings and that’s that.

But there’s an ending here, and he feels it coming. The quickening of those three strands of melodies, the clashing together, speed that has his fingers flying to keep up. A pinnacle that could be nothing more than a clash of sounds if he played it wrong. But he doesn’t. He keeps up, he plays perfectly, and it’s a perfect climax to this long, strangely pre-formed new song of his.

After the height of the ending, though, the tune fades in an uncertain way. The two happy, strong melodies that have ruled the song slip away together, and only the slowing pluck of that Latin tune is left. It feels lonely by itself, and it slows and fades away into silence, like it knows that without the rest of the tunes there it’s not got a lot to say.

He strums out a few last notes, and then he knows it’s over.

 

* * *

 

Barry wants to say something, since he knows they have to get up and get cleaned up and get to bed soon. There’s a spell in the silence, though, and he has to break it carefully.

He thinks about making some joke about flipping the couch cushions before the next time their parents stop by, but though she would giggle and maybe nip at his arm for it, it’s not the right way to go.

She’s been petting fingers through his hair for the last couple of minutes. There’s something she wants to say too, he can tell, but she’s thinking it over.

It’s weird. They’re never really at a loss for words together. When they’re quiet together, and they are a lot, it’s because silence is a comfortable thing for them. They don’t usually have to think about what to say before they say it, even in the afterglow of some really, really incredible sex.

Even more strange, he knows what he wants to say. He knows exactly. But he’s hesitating. It doesn’t feel wrong to him, but it feels like it should feel wrong.

Still, her fingers sift through his hair, and her breathing is matched to his, and he traces the pads of his fingers along her collarbone absently, and finally he just speaks.

“We should have said goodbye to him.”

Her breath stutters.

He lifts his head from her shoulder to look at her, momentarily worried, but there’s a shine in her eyes that relaxes him. She’s on the same page as him. If his words weren’t exactly what she was debating saying they were just close enough to startle her.

She answers quietly, her gaze locked on his. “I can ask Mason for his number on Monday.”

Barry dips his head down and kisses her.

 

* * *

 

Cisco leans back against the wall, fingers tingling, arms tired. He sets the Fender down beside him and drifts fingertips up the neck fondly.  

It’s good, what he’s got there. It’s really good. He’s not sure it’s ever going to let itself be shaped into a kicky four minute version, or let him place some inane chorus verse chorus on top of it, but it’s good.

His recorder is peeking out from under a pair of jeans on the floor, he can see it now that he’s not looking for it. But he just smiles to himself and decides not to worry about it.

Long and complex as it was, he’s pretty sure he isn’t going to forget a single note of what he just played. **  
**


End file.
